Semester Two, end of week 3: already behind in readings?! Yes. (Simone)
On Thursday afternoon, a massive tidal wave of assignments and readings pulled me under. Now, normally, I can swim through these – after year 12 my freestyle is pretty solid! – but, I feel like right now I’ve started to drown. It’s all too much, and I can’t see any cute life guards ready to save me (i.e. do all my homework), so I’m losing oxygen and eating chocolate (under water, yeah – go with it!), and praying/trying to convince myself I will sort it all out. Maybe surviving the university “sea” of issues requires a different stroke, like butterfly, and that’s why my perfected freestyle isn’t working? Or maybe I can’t be bothered doing freestyle. And yet I’m drowning. Hmmm.
Oh dear, please excuse that terrible, terrible analogy! – yes, this is the desperate point I have reached!
See, I promised myself last semester that this time, seeing as I know what uni is all about now in second semester, I would not get bogged down by readings. I told myself I would be super prepared, always organised. With my amazing four day weekend, I envisaged myself spending every Friday at the library surrounded by notes and flow charts and summaries… I told myself I would have enough time balance work with a bit of socialising as well as extras, like making little cute lunches for myself to take to uni through the week, in coloured plastic tuppleware with those forks that fit into the lid… I would be well-rested, eating healthily, money jiggling in my pockets, exercising regularly, with an effective, habitual study plan that assured me I never got behind and never left anything to the last minute. I imagined I would be in a kind of ‘zen’ state with the balance of everything in the palm of my hands… you would find me gracefully, steadily walking through the lovely UniMelb campus, a gentle smile on my face, ready for whatever the world would throw at me…
But, Jesus, I was clearly dreaming. Dreaming a lot ! I feel like I’m exactly the opposite of everything I’d planned to be in semester two. I’ve already skipped a couple of lectures – for good cause, I should say – but not caught up on them. I say Yes to extra shifts Coles offers me even when I know it’ll mean I’m cutting into the time I was meant to be studying and when I can barely stand up I’m so tired. I barely sleep, it feels, as I stay up a few nights a week cramming before my tutorials, and then binge on the free time over my weekend catching up with friends instead of having the early nights I need. I’m still broke, mostly because I never find the time to make those cute lunches and end up buying it everyday which really adds up quickly (as well as a coffee… or two…). And, I’m seriously struggling to get all of these readings done! Like, seriously struggling. I don’t know how anyone could do it all and remain sane/have a social/work life. This week, for instance, I’m reading the Communist Manifesto and ‘Wasteland’ poetry and approx 60 pages of my Media, Identity reader, and probably about 45 of intense Media Law readings. Plus an essay due on Friday. Plus beginning that other essay due in a few weeks. And let’s not count the bits and pieces of readings and lectures I never got around to in the last three weeks!!
I feel quite terribly guilty about it all, to be honest. That I should be ‘trying harder’ and getting more done, being better prepared for things. But no one’s perfect. We all do as much as we can – we try to stay afloat, above it all. And you know what? We can always doggy-paddle when we start to drown.
(That’s not going to happen NEXT week, of course! No doggy-paddling for me! Next week, see, I am most definitely going to be SUPER organised, you won’t even recognise me! I’ll go to bed early and not procrastinate and bring packed lunches and spend my first day off, Friday, sitting at the library with a coffee and some highlighters…)